If you’ve ever wondered whether everything you know is just an intricately fabricated story shaped largely by your own experiences and thoughts, the answer is yes. If you’ve ever wondered whether life on Earth is just a fluke, the answer is maybe? If you’d rather ignore the complexities of existence and the human mind and just briefly wonder at some of the details that go into a TV show, here’s that, too.
Let’s take a break from all of this wondering–which, let’s face it, is hard work–and just get annoyed about wine forgery. But, then, doesn’t it make you wonder whether any of it matters? If you can’t detect that a fancy bottle of wine is less fancy than what you paid for, you’re probably not actually in it for the wine, in which case I have nothing more to say to you.
As kids, we have phases: dinosaurs, mummies, space, etc. We perfect drawing our favorite dinosaur during recess, or take out books about ancient embalming from the local library, or we print out pictures of the planets, color them in, and tape them to the walls of the spare room and call it a Planetarium; admission is five cents. (The last one can’t just be me, right?)
But then the excitement wanes: learning becomes less cool and emotionally liberating than other things like writing out crushes’ names in very careful cursive in the margins of our notebooks. The public school system doesn’t try hard enough to excite its students; science falls to the wayside and no one’s there to reverse this.
In the fall of 1980, PBS aired thirteen episodes of a show in which a man with a certain velvety aura travels across the universe and across time in a “Spaceship of the Imagination.” (This spaceship is shaped like a dandelion seed and is very spacious indeed and looks like it’s not too complicated to operate. Also, sometimes the floor becomes transparent so you can look down at space below.) The man is smiling approximately 94% of the time, he wears a lot of brown clothing, often there is a turtleneck involved, and his voice is excruciatingly creamy: in other words, he is decidedly someone you’d like to read you a bedtime story every night. This show, Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, is the most widely-viewed PBS show in the world.
Carl Sagan, the narrator and co-writer of Cosmos, was an astrophysicist, astronomer, and, very importantly, a science communicator. The goal he had in mind for the show was to inspire wonder at science, and to inspire future scientists.
On March 9, 2014, Fox will premiere the first episode of the sequel, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey. Hosted this time by Neil de Grasse Tyson – a much more vigorous personality, yet also with very specific sensuousness about him – it seems from the trailer and NPR’s Fresh Air interview that the show will strongly recall the original Cosmos. Tyson is an astrophysicist and director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Museum of Natural History in New York, and though I can’t yet be sure of his wardrobe on the show, he does majestically don sunglasses as the Big Bang erupts in front of him in the trailer. Also, the Spaceship of the Imagination is no longer a dandelion seed: it’s sleek and shiny (i.e. “modern”).
To be honest, when I first heard that Cosmos was being revamped, I was skeptical. I wondered why Neil de Grasse Tyson & co. didn’t just make an entirely new show. Tyson is a very different personality than Sagan, sensuousness aside: to me, Cosmos wasn’t a modern, mega-visual effected, galactic bonanza of spectacle, as I was sure the remake would be. It was a contemplative place, mellow though breath-taking. But the objective of the original Cosmos – to excite and inspire – was valid and important one… and it still is. So I realized, that’s why a modernized sequel is also valid and important.
Will people care to tune in? The show will be broadcast March 9, 2014 at 9/8c, airing across ten networks, including Fox, FX, and NatGeo. On Fox, it will follow Family Guy, whose audience demographic is the most coveted: 18-34 year old males. (And FYI, Seth MacFarlane is an executive producer of Cosmos.) But anyways, don’t we know that kids these days aren’t watching cable? To me, and hopefully to some of the creators of the shower (though definitely not the media execs at Fox), television ratings don’t much matter when assessing the success of Cosmos. For one, they are skewed with Hulu and all the other variations of online viewing. But the point isn’t where or how people watch the show – it isn’t that they tune into Fox at 9pm on March 9th – but that they watch it at all.
And I’m optimistic – Bill Nye recently brought on a slew of science interest and consideration recently, and just in time. His debate in early February versus Ken Ham, the founder of the Creation Museum, sparked discussion and shock (and a tad of nostalgia for the Science Guy days) with regards to science knowledge and education – every major news organization commented, and Twitter was a-flutter. This proves that people are interested, they just aren’t offered the resources or conditions under which to indulge in their natural human curiosity. Given the lack of motivators, maybe television – at least at 9pm on Sundays – is the best babysitter.
So, an astrophysicist, an engineer, and the President of the United States walk into The Blue Room…. http://t.co/qoB5exZCbH
At the age of eleven, Tyson spoke with a teacher at P.S. 81 about his fascination with astronomy. Tyson’s older brother, Stephen, who is an artist, recalls, “The teacher asked, ‘Why do you want to go into science? There aren’t any Negroes in the field. Why don’t you go into sports?'”
In science, as in other areas of our culture, there is no dearth of voices, but are we paying attention? In the new New Age, it’s all about which cable channels you watch or whom you follow on Twitter.
We could use a national conversation that is not about scandal or sports. If everybody watches the new “Cosmos,” we can talk about it the way we once argued about “The Sopranos” every Monday morning.
Lokal 